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I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child, and that if these faculties are encouraged in youth they will act well and wisely in the adult, but that if they are repressed and denied in the child they will stunt and cripple the adult personality. And finally, I believe that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination.

‘What would you say to the families of the people who will be killed in an invasion? Going to war is more complex than the President is making it sound. It’s not as simple as that. There are always other ways to think about it.’

I don’t think anyone really deserves to die, I don’t think it’s right, but I think it’s sometimes necessary. I think it can be justified if you have no other option or if you’ve already tried all the other options and they haven’t worked. You can kill someone in self-defense, if the person is directly threatening to kill you or somebody else particularly if that person isn’t capable of defending themselves. It’s always more complicated than that but that’s the basic principle.

When kids are making fun of another kid, you have to imagine from the point of view of the person who’s being horrible and you feel sorry for the person who’s being ridiculed. If you intervene and you stick up for them sometimes you don’t because you’re afraid others will laugh at you.

There's always evil as well as good ... because without evil there can't be good. There needs to be shadow for there to be light. There needs to be yang for there to be yin. They need each other. If everyone was perfectly good there'd be nothing to define the good or to make it good.

Holland et al argue that over time a person’s everyday choices and their usual attachments form into relatively stable aspects of their identities creating ‘sediment from past experiences’ (1998, pp. 18, 137).

‘Agency lies in the improvisations that people create in response to particular situations, mediated by [their] senses and sensitivities. They opportunistically use whatever is at hand to affect their position in the cultural game in the experience of which they have formed … sets of dispositions’

Using what Bakhtin (1981) called ‘the dialogic imagination’ we can ethically evaluate actions from the viewpoints and discourses of others who address us.

Imagination is ethically so significant because we can evaluate the consequences of our own and others’ particular actions by viewing and understanding them from the different standpoints of people who may or may not be physically present.

As Vygotsky (1978) recognized, when children play, their attention is more on the meaning of things and actions in imagined worlds rather than on actual objects and movements in the everyday. Children create an imagined world when they play.

Adults playing with children must also focus on the meaning of imagined violent or loving actions, including their ethical meaning.

By returning again and again to ethically evaluate with me imagined events both in play and by referring to them as he made sense of daily events, Michael was using play events as ethical ‘heuristic devices’

…that ‘turn toward self-understanding’ of thoughts and emotions in situations

… and as facets of identities they ‘are social forms of organization, public and intimate, that mediate the development of human agency’ and self-management (Holland et al 1998, p. 282).

Quickly, the knight rose. He drew his sharp sword and struck the dragon’s head so fiercely that it seemed nothing could withstand the blow. The dragon’s crest was too hard to take a cut, but he wanted no more such blows. He tried to fly away and could not because of this wounded wing.

Loudly, he bellowed – the like was never heard before – and from his body, like a wide devouring oven, sent a flame of fire that scorched the knight’s face and heated his armor red-hot. Faint, wary, sore, burning with head and wounds, the knight fell to the ground, ready to die and the dragon clapped his iron wings in victory, while the lady, watching from afar, fell to her knees. She thought that the champion had lost the battle (Hodges, 1986, unnumbered pages).

Meaning can be regarded as made in a dialogic interplay among our interpretations of the authority of the different positions of characters and readers on the meaning of a particular events and across narratives.

Interpretations that are in ‘reciprocal simultaneity that yokes each of these pairings in dialogue not only with each other, but with other [possible selves and identities] as well’ (Bakhtin 1990, p. xxvii).

Michael authored his own innerly persuasive discourses about play events as he evaluated deeds as right-and-wrong in an on-going dialogue with me across multiple, repeated, but also changing situations

He authored his ethical identity as he combined the competing ‘voices’ he used to address the world and answer from the multiple positions of different possible selves

I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child, and that if these faculties are encouraged in youth they will act well and wisely in the adult, but that if they are repressed and denied in the child they will stunt and cripple the adult personality. And finally, I believe that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination [as harnessed in playing with children].